Australian diplomats heading to Port Moresby call it ''Port shit-scared''.

Diplomats generally live in compounds fenced off from the community. Before arriving in the violent, sporadically lawless capital, they are schooled in what not to do, where not to go. Many are trained in how to drive to avert car-jacking or worse.

Illustration: John Spooner.

High-speed reversing and performing J-turns, are hardly the skills one normally needs in a peaceful democracy. And this is for a posting in the capital where the police presence is strongest, civil society most developed, and the rule of law, most obvious.

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Out in the regions where infrastructure is rudimentary, the coercive apparatus of the state exerts even less influence. The vacuum is filled by poverty, lawlessness, violence, and corruption. PNG is a borderline failed state.

Yet this is the country Kevin Rudd, in his second desperate incarnation as prime minister, decided should assume Australia's international obligations to protect and permanently resettle asylum seekers arriving by boat.

With this week's fatal riots at the Manus Island immigration detention centre, the abject moral bankruptcy of that decision has been laid bare.

Labor's muted response to the crisis now engulfing the Manus Island centre and the policy under which it was established reveal another harsh reality. Brutality is a bipartisan position.

It took Rudd's boundless ambition, to backflip by signing the deal with PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill, but it has taken a special kind of focus from Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison to see the policy through to its current horror.

Rudd has now left the Parliament, but the stain of that hasty cynical arrangement is his legacy - and that of Labor. It was struck in full knowledge of the economic limitations of PNG, its rampant police corruption and the functional political limits of Port Moresby's authority.

Rudd hoped it would neutralise the Abbott opposition's rampaging war on Labor's failed asylum seeker policy, at least for long enough to make it through an election he was about to call. The then opposition duly slammed the PNG plan as irrelevant and unworkable, but then adopted it once in office.

No one pretends the policy of zero admissions to Australia is not harsh - indeed, that is a central design feature, calculated to remind refugees that Australia is closed to all but those entering via the UNHCR queue.

Its sole, and until now, compelling, moral justification is that by stopping the boats the government has stopped people drowning at sea. Yet now, with fatal shots fired, it is the policy itself that has begun killing people.

After 24 hours of disturbances among the hapless and hopeless 1340 asylum seekers held there, one man is dead, a dozen more are seriously injured, and another 65 have lesser injuries.

While Morrison projected his now standard contempt for accountability, holding faux press conferences where he refused to answer most questions, two things have become increasing clear.

First, that Manus Island, hell-hole that it is, is not just part of Operation Sovereign Borders, it is its linchpin. Without it, the whole offshore policy crumbles.

The fact that everything depends on Manus remaining online was evidenced by Abbott's emergency chat with O'Neill in the wake of the first incident on Monday night. The Australian PM was reassured that PNG was still solid. The spectre of First World wealthy Australia craning in desperation to retain the acquiescence of its impoverished neighbour is an embarrassment and reveals the structural flaw at the heart of the policy.

Second, with the riots on Manus, there is a powerful sense of deja vu. Riots, hunger strikes, suicides, and dysfunctional behaviour were all products of indefinite detention in the remote onshore camps of the early 2000s. This is the future now for those banished to Manus and Nauru.

If asylum seekers are attributed no other virtue, their supreme ability to conceptualise a better future must at least be acknowledged. Why else would any risk their lives?

Indefinite detention is specifically designed to obliterate that future. We already know how that ends.

95 comments

Doesn't matter what happens to them. It's not as if we're dealing with real people here. Not thinking, feeling, caring and decent ones like us.

Commenter

rext

Date and time

February 20, 2014, 7:47AM

Labor were warned before they weakened our border protection laws but they did not care. The left did not care that 1200 people died making the crossing BUT they are outraged that one person has died during a riot that they started.

Just imagine if the laws were not weakened. We would not be talking about this. 1200 people would be still alive.

Well done Kevin and Julia and all the luvvies who cheered when they changed the laws. You all must be so proud of yourselves.

Commenter

Pragmatic prince

Date and time

February 20, 2014, 9:43AM

Border protection has got nothing to do with people drowning at sea on their way to Australia. It is about creating political capital out of xenophobia, and using Eddie Bernays's techniques to sell the useless Liberal Party to non-thinking voters.

Commenter

brutus

Location

indi

Date and time

February 20, 2014, 10:38AM

Agreed PP. We have one dead versus over 1000 drowned at sea. It amazes me how people like SHY can stick their head so far in the sand.

Commenter

mh

Location

Brisbane

Date and time

February 20, 2014, 10:41AM

PrinceYes it all followed on from Howard's determination to attract the right wing ratbags back to the Liberals from One Nation. Labor most certainly did care! More so than the ALP leadership millions of us believed the cold, callous and calculated cruelty and indifference to their suffering shown towards these asylum seekers was a disgrace and brought lasting shame to Labor and that those attitudes are part of the DNA of hard right conservatives, not the ALP.

Commenter

rext

Date and time

February 20, 2014, 10:47AM

A baseless and politically convenient argument PP. The way we're treating people on Manus and other detention centres is appalling.

Commenter

meatatarian

Date and time

February 20, 2014, 11:08AM

@Pragmatic prince - are you an idiot? If the laws had been strengthened then we would have more people in these sorts of camps (btw it was the Labor government who created the PNG camp and the Liberal one who opposed the Malaysia one which would have been safer).

Commenter

Lance

Date and time

February 20, 2014, 11:11AM

So is the answer more people and children paying greedy, uncaring smugglers to get on leaky boats and risking death at sea? The writer should be applauding a policy that appears to have stopped the boats, carnage and flood of illegal immigrants - 50000 according to reports under Labor/Greens policy. They will not acknowledge the blood on their hands yet condemn the Coalition for trying and instituting the policy the vast majority of Australians voted for. Even Indonesia is seeing a slowing of people looking to get on boats - surely these facts are worth recognizing. As for the radical Iranian government caring one jot about human rights when asking about its citizen that supposedly fled their regime - give us a break...

20 Feb
The torrid dilemma has dogged the Pacific solution from its earliest incarnation in the Howard years to Julia Gillard's eventual embrace of the policy. Successive governments have struggled to explain what responsibility Australia bears for asylum seekers detained in camps run and paid for by Australia but operating in the legal jurisdiction of other nations.

20 Feb
Papua New Guinea locals employed by security guards at the Manus Island detention centre attacked asylum seekers with machetes, knives and rocks, an interpreter employed by the Australian Immigration Department has claimed.

19 Feb
Tensions on Manus Island had been building for days. On Sunday night, asylum seekers at the detention centre were told that if they were not found to be a refugee, neither the Australian nor Papua New Guinea governments would help them resettle in Papua New Guinea. So far, not one of the 1340 asylum seekers has had their refugee application processed.

19 Feb
Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs has urged the Abbott government to appoint a respected former judge or public servant to investigate the conditions in Australia's offshore detention centres.

20 Feb
Australia's army chief has dismissed the prospect that tensions between Indonesia and Australia could erupt into military conflict in the future, saying ''cool heads on both sides'' would always prevail.

21 Feb
The Abbott government has suffered the ignominy of having its asylum seeker policy publicly criticised by another foreign government - this time China, a country with its own chequered human rights record.